


I Love You (to the moon and back)

by moodyme



Series: The Magic of the Shining Skies [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam and Ronan are Opal's dads and thats just the way it is, Adam and Ronan are like in their early 30s in this, Adoption, Astronaut!Adam, But also, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Light Angst, M/M, POV Ronan Lynch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 15:32:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20530343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodyme/pseuds/moodyme
Summary: Adam and Ronan, going through the adoption process, and the life they make with Opal.





	I Love You (to the moon and back)

**Author's Note:**

> Adoption is serious stuff guys and so some of this may be more heavy than you were expecting. Sorry.  
If you want to skip the most serious stuff, skip to below the first line break. Most of the heavy stuff regarding the process of adoption is in the area above that first line, and is totally skippable if you want to avoid 90% of the non fluffy bits in this fic.

Ronan thinks the home study goes surprisingly easy. They have a spare bedroom made up from what had been a mostly empty room with an en-suite bathroom across from the office and down the hall from their bedroom. The woman doing the inspection is professionally friendly, if distant, and apparently loves their kitchen and wood floors, but more or less, it's easy. 

The background check is decidedly less easy.

"You were a minor when all that shit went down," Adam tells him, trying to soothe him as they lay tangled on the couch together, "You've gotten therapy, you went to the meetings, you volunteer. Ronan. You're a good person, the best I know, and they will see that, I promise you."

And Adam keeps talking, promising him that the mistakes he made more than a decade ago won't keep them from being fathers. It won't. 

Ronan still prays an extra prayer to St. William of Perth and attends Mass a little more regularly and takes nine days to pray a Novena to St. Joseph.

Later, when they sit at opposite ends of the dining room table, and they are both bent over the adoption questionnaire, Adam says "We could go through a Russian agency,".

"They stopped allowing U.S adoptions years ago, not to mention us being a same-sex couple," Ronan mumbles, knowing Adam had only mentioned it to distract himself from the same questionnaire. It has more pages than Ronan thought it would, and he spends more time with each following question than the last. "You keep suggesting it because you want to show off that you know Russian."

"Well, sorry my school didn't offer Latin as a standard course," Adam says. Then, maybe to show off, he murmurs something to Flufflestiltskin, who is curled under the table around his feet, in Russian. 

Ronan can hear the pencil move across his page, and he wonders what question he is reading, what answer he gives.

Would he consider a child with autism? Down syndrome? Epilepsy?

With adjustment problems? Developmental delays? How severe?

With a history of neglect? Of drug exposure? Alcohol exposure?

Of abuse? Was he okay with an open adoption? Would he prefer one that was closed? 

What about a teenager? Did it matter to him how the child hard been conceived, no matter how awfully?

How about gender, or race? Did they have a preference either way?

Ronan read each question, and with each question his heart broke a little more. That was a child, being described. A child that, maybe, Ronan and Adam wouldn't be able to care for properly, weren't equipped to care for in a way that was best for the child in question.

And it broke his fucking heart.

* * *

Ronan is twisting his wedding ring around his finger, a nervous tick he had picked up just weeks after their wedding. It reminded him of his high school days, when he would chew on the leather bands he had worn around his wrist.

The wooden chair in the adoption centers hallway is uncomfortable, hard underneath him and the back is awkward and the legs are slightly uneven. He wonders of this is by design, a way of testing potential parents.

He stops fidgeting.

A woman opens the door next to them, and beside him, Adam sits straighter, as though he is about to stand. Ronan glances at him, at the tightness of his jaw that belays the calmness over the rest of his features. He is as nervous as Ronan is, and that knowledge helps calm him more than anything.

"It'll only be a few moments longer, Captain Lynch," she says, addressing Adam. 

The name calms him even further. That they have the same name, that they are in this together.

The woman smiles at him, and its a soft and gentle thing that reminds him of his own mother with a dull pang of loss, before her practical heels go click-click-clicking down the hall.

The clock on the wall continues on, monotonously, and Ronan goes back to twisting his wedding ring. Eventually, he feels Adam reach across the small divide in their chairs, and take his hand in his. Ronan laces their fingers together, and they wait.

Finally, a man comes striding purposefully down the hall, enters the office across from them with a confident twist of the knob, and, a moment later, ushers them inside.

The chairs in the office are marginally more comfortable than the chairs in the hall, but still achingly uncomfortable. The man, a Mr. Davidson, shakes their hands and greets them with a genial smile. 

"I've just been going over your file," He says, and Ronan doesn't exactly tune him out, it's just hard to process everything he's saying.

"Ideal candidates for adoption"

"Quick placement"

"A good home"

"Stable relationships"

The words tumble over him and he feels Adam's hand tighten around his. It's too much. It's too good to be true. 

Later, when the meeting is over and they've shaken hands once again with Mr. Davidson and somehow find themselves back in the parking lot, sitting in their car, they both cry.

* * *

Life, at the request and advice of their case worker, mostly goes back to normal.

Adam spends more time at the Johnson Space Center, racking up leave hours for the adoption.

Ronan, for the first time in years, picks up a tennis racket and starts playing again. He convinces Adam to join him for several weekends before Adam starts declining his offers to play, and instead takes up watching him, sometimes with a mischievous grin that makes Ronan feel years younger and makes him crowd Adam into the backseat of the car each time.

He volunteers some more at the shelter Lindsey runs, and Adam teases him for trying to make Flufflestiltskin jealous.

Adam, when he gets home, starts scrap booking, which surprises Ronan and thrills Gansey, who offers him several unsolicited opinions on the subject. He also starts cooking more, watching recipe videos on YouTube with a pinched expression, pausing and rewinding the videos several times each recipe, making sure he was doing it right.

Finally, on a surprising cool (for Houston) September afternoon, while Ronan is at home alone, the call comes. 

The agency had placed them.

He calls Adam with shaking fingers and tells him the news. A month later, after Adam fills out form after form requesting leave and changing his insurance plan and life insurance and other forms that neither are really sure what they even _mean_. After Ronan and Adam both sign form after form for the adoption agency. After a month of forms that leave them with callouses on their hands, they finally get to take her home.

Her name is Opal.

She is three years old.

She has blond hair and brown eyes.

She had been born with a clubfoot that had been treated while she was a baby, but that, the case worker had warned, would likely still cause her some difficulties with walking. Her right foot would probably always be a little larger, her left leg a little weaker.

When she spoke, she often screamed, and it sounded like the screech of a bird, or a cat that had accidentally had it's tail stepped on.

She has a mole on her left eyebrow.

She is playing a game of patty-cake on the living room floor with Adam.

She is the most beautiful thing Ronan has ever seen.

* * *

One night, Ronan passes by Opal's bedroom door, and Adam, who is the one reading her to sleep that night, is on, Ronan suspects, his fourth or fifth book of the night. It almost always takes that many for Opal to fall asleep. He pauses, leaning against the open door, and listens to Adam's soft voice as he reads.

"...'Then he looked beyond the thorn bushes, out into the big dark night. Nothing could be farther than the sky.'" He reads, his tone flowing, doing a little voice for the story that is too cute, "'I love you right up to the moon,' he said, and closed his eyes. 'Oh, that's far,' said Big Nutbrown Hare. 'That is very, very far.' Big Nutbrown Hare settled Little Nutbrown Hare into his bed of leaves. He leaned over and kissed him goodnight.'-" Adam leaned down to place a gentle kiss to Opal's forehead, when he spoke again, his voice was even softer, and Ronan suspected Opal was already asleep "-'Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, 'I love you right up to the moon- and back.'"

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
